The Great Game of Business Blog

The Huddle cycle consists of a series of meetings where financial and operational numbers are shared and forecasted. These meetings include a Pre-Huddle, Main-Huddle and Post-Huddle, all with different focuses and objectives. When performed properly, the Huddle Cycle saves time despite the additional meetings by providing improved communication within your company, better execution of your tasks and strategies, and a clear understanding of how each employee affects the success of the company.

In this blog series written by Great Game employees, we will highlight some of the highest rated sessions at the 2018 Gathering of Games conference. Account manager Dan Heisler covers the session "Begin with the Right Leadership: The Essentials of Leadership in a Great Game Company" led by certified Great Game Coach Kevin Walter. Based on his years working with Great Game companies, Kevin defines what it takes to become an effective leader in a Great Game and open-book environment. Here, he highlights the difference between traditional leadership styles and the most effective approach for Great Game companies, emphasizing the impact of having the right leadership in your organization.

Creating an informed and engaged workforce doesn't happen overnight...and isn't sustainable without the dedication and focus of the whole team. To help get your Game off on the right foot in the new year, here's a list of must-know tips from our best blogs to help The Game excel at your company.

You wouldn’t drive your car while only looking in the rear-view mirror…why run your business looking only at the past? This is the method many businesses have used for decades: close the books, review the numbers, repeat. While reviewing and analyzing company financials is an important process, you can’t change history. Forward forecasting is a way of communicating your company’s financials while keeping all eyes on the target. The purpose of forward forecasting is not to predict the future, but to influence it. This process minimizes surprises by having employees estimate or offer an educated opinion on what to expect.

Many of you have probably heard of Brené Brown. You may have read her books like The Gifts of Imperfection, Daring Greatly, or her newest release, Dare to Lead. Or, you may have heard her famous Ted Talk, “The Power of Vulnerability,” which has scored over 35 million views. If you are not familiar with her work, Brown is a social scientist who studies the concept of shame and vulnerability and how they shape us as human beings and as leaders. She found that those who embrace their weaknesses and let themselves be shown are the ones who live the most fulfilled lives. But what does vulnerability have to do with the Great Game and open-book management?

At the Great Game of Business, we hope to not only transform businesses but also change the lives of the individual employees within those companies. Our goal is to transform the lives of 10 million people in the next 10 years. In this blog series, we are striving toward our 10-million-person goal by sharing stories of personal transformation resulting from the Great Game of Business and open-book management. Here, we feature Rob and Rachel Kelsey from King Maintenance Management in Springfield, Missouri, and how they brought the Great Game home to tackle their personal debts and reach their goal of starting their own business.

Goodbye 2018, hello 2019, and hello to a whole new slew of resolutions that last a couple of weeks and then back to our old ways. Are you tired of setting a goal and then not achieving it? With a small amount of self-control and a bit of determination, you can create a new habit that requires minimal effort to maintain. Here are 8 easy ways to create a new habit and stick to it.

At any given time in your business, there is one thing, an operational or financial number that represents a weakness or vulnerability that, if not addressed and corrected, will negatively impact the overall performance and long-term security of the business. This one thing is known as your company’s Critical Number™. Ultimately, the Critical Number defines winning. It rallies people around a common goal and directs a focus to what’s most important to the company’s success. From this definition, it’s clear to see why identifying a Critical Number is valuable to your business, but the Critical Number is also very important to your employees. If they do not understand and buy-in to the Critical Number, it is likely that this number will continue to go unnoticed. Here are three key ways the right Critical Number will strengthen your business:

I was saddened to hear about the loss of Herb Kelleher, the founder of Southwest Airlines. I’ll never forget the time back in the early 1990s when I was invited to Texas to talk about the Great Game of Business with Herb and his team at Southwest. After I gave my talk, I figured everything I had shared about our open-book story wasn’t worth much given how big Southwest was and how many locations they operated out of. I wasn’t sure our Great Game system would work in a big company. Then Herb stood up. He took over the podium and told his leaders that there were only five things that could take out their company: their five unions. I admit I was shocked because I didn’t know they were a union company. But Herb then told his team that the only way their airline was going to make it was if they could teach everyone, all ninety thousand people—including every union employee—how the company made money and generated cash.

In this series written by Great Game employees, we will highlight some of the highest rated sessions at the 2018 Gathering of Games conference. In this blog, Donna Petiford, Great Game's Quality Assurance Manager, covers the session How to Engage, Motivate and Inspire Employees by John Williams. John, an 8-year Gathering of Games speaker, works at Central States Manufacturing and has been playing since 1988. Check out the highlights from John's "give one, get one" session, where he tapped into the wisdom of the crowd to compile best practices on engaging your employees to their highest potential, as well as, the audio from the session below.

It's simple. You cannot successfully implement open-book management and the Great Game unless every employee understands the financials and drivers of the business. But what puts the "best of the best" in open-book management above the rest when it comes to financial literacy training? We asked this year's All-Stars how they transformed their businesses to create a financial literacy focus that promotes engagement and accountability from top to bottom in their organization.

For more than 25 years, we’ve helped thousands of companies implement open-book management to its fullest capacity. Along the way, we’ve developed a list of common mistakes companies make while using transparency and open-book management in their organization. If you think you are not executing open-book management correctly, or are not seeing the results you expected, then you may be making one of these four common errors:

About The Great Game of Business

Our approach to running a company was developed to help close one of the biggest gaps in business: the gap between managers and employees. We call our open-book approach The Great Game of Business. What lies at the heart of The Game is a very simple proposition: The best, most efficient, most profitable way to operate a business is to give everybody in the company a voice in saying how the company is run and a stake in the outcome. Let us teach you how to develop a culture of ownership, where employees think, act and feel like owners.

Tapping into the universal human need to win, GGOB educates your people in the rules of business, rallies them around a common goal, empowers them to see and improve the score, and engages them by giving them skin in the game... presenting them with the opportunity to win (or lose) as a team.